Outlook 2016: How CRM Will Foster an Era of Good Feelings

KNOWLEDGE MANAGEMENT AND CUSTOMER SERVICE

Knowledge management now plays a role not only in post-sale support, but also in pre-sale engagement. Because consumers compare and research products more than ever before, arming employees with the right knowledge to help shoppers make decisions is crucial, says Kate Leggett, a Forrester analyst. What's also important is to eliminate the one-size-fits-all path to knowledge in favor of knowledge assets that can be deeply contextualized and personalized to an individual consumer and his past and present behavior, and then served up at the point of need.

"The problem with knowledge right now is that most companies put a knowledge base in place and then walk away from it. Knowledge becomes this manual overhead of pulling reports and trying to see what content is suboptimal and where content holes are," Leggett says.

In the near future, however, knowledge vendors are going to become better at adding automation to optimize content and make the search process less manual and intensive, she asserts. Eventually, content creation and retrieval will be automated and optimized to the point where the right content will be "bubbled up" when it's needed. "We're not quite there yet," Leggett says, "but we're heading in this direction."

MOBILE CRM IS A STAPLE SOLUTION

Mobile CRM is no longer a trend or a novel idea—it's a core part of the industry. Though solutions vary in maturity, effectiveness, and innovation, as a whole, mobile CRM systems are "good enough," Greenberg says. Some, he adds, are even impressive. At Oracle OpenWorld in September 2015, Oracle demonstrated a CRM, ERP, supply chain management, and enterprise performance management integration on a single mobile device, combined with analytics and "the kind of enterprise power that you would expect from Oracle," Greenberg says. "The interface made it pretty easy to use given the complexity of what we're talking about here, and overall it was a reasonable representation of the technology that reflected the enterprise value chain on a mobile device. It was enough to make me say, 'Wow,'" he says.

Though mobile CRM solutions will likely never replace full desktop suites, they've come pretty far in a fairly short amount of time, analysts say. What's most notable is that vendors now understand the requirements for on-the-go CRM and deliver mobile solutions that may not do everything but execute certain critical processes very well. "Mobile solutions have gotten better from everybody," Wang says. "They're not designed to replace the system, but to simplify the way people work in motion. It's not about a device; it's about how we work when we're not at a desk."

OMNICHANNEL SERVICE SEPARATES LEADERS FROM LAGGARDS

After engagement, the term omnichannel might be the most hyped word in the CRM industry today, but the concept is as critical as ever. Multichannel is no longer enough—customers expect a unified experience, and there's no room for redundancies or inconsistencies as they navigate across channels, especially when it comes to service and support. "You can't tell your customers to contact you just over email or just over the phone. They want to start an interaction on one channel, move to another channel, and not have to repeat the information they've already communicated to you," Leggett says.

Some of the leading providers of unified omnichannel service solutions orchestrate seamless transitions not only between agent-supported channels, but also between agent-provided service and self-service. The Genesys Omnichannel Customer Experience platform, for example, combines context from all channels, including voice, with multimodality, orchestration capabilities, and journey life cycle management to more effectively manage omnichannel service. If it seems that unified omnichannel service solutions are expected to "do it all," that's because they are, Leggett says.

Customers don't think about channels, journeys, or engagements, of course. They simply want what they want when they want it. And that logic has always applied to every aspect of the CRM industry; the difference now is that vendors can actually enable companies to deliver on these many wants and needs.

It's an exciting time for CRM—solutions are smarter, more streamlined, and, thanks to the flexibility of the cloud, more affordable and intuitive as well. New providers are becoming more ambitious, and humbled legacy vendors are being forced to think innovatively to compete. It is now the era of the customer, and many companies understand that CRM technology is required to satisfy this new wave of consumers.

Maria Minsker is a reporter at eMarketer and a contributing writer for SmartCustomerService.com. She can be reached at maria.minsker@gmail.com or on Twitter @mariaminsker.

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